FP-45 Liberator
|barrel= |weight= |justweight=~ |magazine=Single shot |cycle= |effective = ~ |range= |velocity=820 ft/s (244 m/s) |notable= |affiliation=Resistance Members in occupied territories}}The FP-45 Liberator (F'lare '''P'rojector Caliber .'''45) was an American single-shot pistol that was produced by the General Motors Guide Lamp Division during World War II. A crudely-designed and cheap weapon never intended for frontline service, the FP-45 was meant to be dropped behind enemy lines and was supposed to be used by Allied soldiers to sneak up and incapacitate Axis combatants and retrieve their weapons. History The Liberator pistol had its origins in the US Army Joint Psychological Committee and was designed for the United States Army in 1942 by the Inland Guide Lamp Manufacturing Division of the General Motors Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. The idea was to develop a simple weapon that could arm vast numbers of resistance fighters in occupied Europe and China, at a low cost. The original prototype was a "harmonica gun" with two chambers that retained cartridges with a small piece of spring steel, but this was further simplified to the final single-shot weapon. The weapon was deliberately mis-designated as the "Flare Projector, Caliber .45", or "FP-45", to disguise the nature of the program and misdirect Axis intelligence. The original engineering drawings labelled the barrel as "tube", the trigger as "yoke", the firing pin as "control rod", and the trigger guard as "spanner." The Guide Lamp Division of General Motors was selected to manufacture the pistol; although the company had no experience in producing firearms, it was well-accustomed to the process of stamping steel and had the appropriate facilities to rapidly turn out massive numbers of the gun. Within three months of production beginning, a million units had been made, averaging about one every 7½ seconds, at a cost of $2.10 apiece ($31.76 adjusted to 2018 dollars). During manufacture the pistol was modified several times, with some changes to the markings, breech and oiling holes. The intended means of deployment was by bomber drops, with each gun packaged in a cardboard box with 10 rounds of ammunition, a dowel rod to assist in reloading and a pictorial instruction sheet. A standard load would be 600 guns, mostly limited by volume rather than weight. Ultimately, however, only a fraction of the million pistols that were made were ever actually deployed. Nazi reprisals against civilian resistance action increased in severity after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (Operation Anthropoid) in May 1942, forcing the Allies to be more cautious in their involvement with European partisan movements. About 25,000 FP-45s were delivered to the French Resistance and a few thousand more were airdropped into Greece. The largest delivery went to China, who received about 100,000 units. After these guns were deployed and the project was discovered by the Axis, the "Flare Projector" designation was dropped and the gun was re-named the "Liberator". After the war, a large number of Liberator pistols were melted down into scrap. However, many thousands survived and remained in circulation, and are now sought after as collector's items. Design The Liberator is a very simplistic breech-loading, single-action smoothbore pistol that fires with a fully locked breech. The gun is made almost entirely of cheap stamped sheet steel assembled by riveting and spot-welding, with a zinc cocking knob. Since it is not designed to be possible to field-strip without destroying it, holes are drilled into the frame to allow for oiling the mechanism. It was intentionally designed to be mediocre in performance, with the idea being that it would be useless if acquired by the enemy. The primary purpose of the weapon was to allow a partisan to kill an occupying soldier at close range and take their weapons and equipment. The rough finish, all-metal construction and use of a fully locked breech rendered the weapon extremely unpleasant to shoot, and it is quite capable of cutting the operator's hands if fired without gloves. The mechanism is manually operated via a cocking knob at the rear, which is pulled back to cock the weapon and twisted to one side to provide access to the breech, with loading facilitated by a block which is pulled upwards and then pushed back down when a round is chambered. The weapon has no extractor of any kind, and while a spent casing may sometimes drop free, most often a provided wooden dowel rod had to be inserted into the muzzle to force the casing out. The grip of the weapon contains a small compartment with a siding cover, which allows up to ten rounds to be stored inside it. The Liberator is fitted with fixed iron sights, though these are of debatable function given the extremely short effective range. The front sight is part of the large curved trigger guard, while the rear sight is incorporated into the taps used for lifting up the block. There were a number of reasons for chambering the weapon in .45 ACP, a caliber not common in Europe at the time. Firstly, the gun was not intended to have a lifespan where ammunition resupply was an issue, since the user surviving ten failed uses of the gun would be extremely unlikely. Most estimates place the lifespan of a Liberator at a maximum of 50 shots. Secondly, the US already had massive production lines laid down for producing .45 ACP, bringing the cost of the weapons down. Thirdly, the use of the low-pressure .45 ACP allowed looser production tolerances than the higher-pressure 9×19mm Parabellum common in Europe. Finally, it was intended that the weapons and their ammunition be useless to occupying German forces: using 9 mm ammunition would potentially mean giving 6,000 rounds of pistol ammunition to the Germans if a drop was captured. Trivia * In the US, the FP-45 is legally not a pistol (as it is a smoothbore and the NFA requires pistols to be rifled), instead fitting the legal "Any Other Weapon" category as it is capable of being "concealed on the person". Original production Liberators were at one point restricted as Title II NFA weapons on this basis, but after a BATFE ruling are now considered "Curios and Relics" under the Gun Control Act. The BATFE has ruled that all reproduction Liberators must be rifled and serialized. * A commonly stated piece of trivia is that the guns were faster to make than they were to reload. This is slightly misleading as it is based on simply dividing total time it took to make all of them by the number of guns made and assuming that to be the time to make one gun. References Category:Pistols